Dr. Margo Wilson

about margo wilson

A tireless, generous advocate of international, interdisciplinary collaboration, Margo spearheaded successful research with colleagues from Canada, Brazil, Japan, Norway, the UK and the USA.

Margo Wilson was born in Winnipeg in 1942. She moved to the Canadian Arctic in 1948, and attended a one-room primary school at which she was the only non-aboriginal pupil. After completing high school in Victoria BC, she earned a BA in psychology from the University of Alberta in 1964, and pursued graduate studies in behavioural endocrinology at the University of California and at University College, London, where she earned her PhD in 1972 for pioneering work on the behavioural effects of gonadectomy and hormone replacement in monkeys.

Margo met Martin Daly in Toronto in 1975, and the two became inseparable, moving to McMaster in 1978, and collaborating on research on the psychology and behaviour of both nonhuman animals and Homo sapiens until her death in 2009. Margo thought outside the box, and one of her most fertile ideas was the homicides provide a rich source of information on interpersonal conflict and thus, more generally, on human passion. This idea launched a 30-year program of epidemiological analyses of who is likely to kill whom, which became Wilson and Daly's best known work.

Academic History

Currently, I am pursuing two main lines of research questions which derive from taking an evolutionary psychological perspective on perceptions, emotions and motivations.

1. Interpersonal conflict and violence: These studies in collaboration with Martin Daly and others are mainly epidemiological analyses of patterns of risk of lethal and nonlethal violence in different categories of relationships, especially, marital and parent-offspring relationships.

2. Perceptions and valuations of the environment: A multi-disciplinary research project, Ecowise, was initiated at McMaster University to study various aspects of the ecosystem of Hamilton Harbour and Cootes Paradise. Some of the research on what people like and know about this ecosystem is described on the Ecowise website (http://www.mcmaster.ca/ecowise).